Tumblr Tops Blogging Service Downtime With 42 Hours Down In 2011

Last December statistics showed that Tumblr was the least reliable popular blogging service, with 47.5 hours of downtime in between October 15 and December 15, 2010. The good news is, Tumblr has shown a decrease in downtime in 2011, but it still tops the charts for blogging service downtime in 2011, clocking in at 42.1 hours down between January 1 and November 30 of this year.
The 42.1 hours of downtime may seem like a lot, compared to the 12.1 hours Posterious saw or the must less significant 1.9 hours of downtime Typepad saw, 1.6 hours WordPress.com saw and 0.3 hours Blogger saw. That being said, 42.1 hours over 11 months is a huge improvement over the 47.5 hours of downtime the site saw in 2 months at the end of last year.

Pingdon, who tested the services by monitoring the availability of each blog platform’s homepage and four individual blogs to gather these statistics, ran down their findings to an average blog downtime per month on each site. They found that, on average, Tumblr was down about 3 hours and 50 minutes per month while Blogger, the most reliable service, was down only about 1.5 minutes per month.

When they narrowed down their Tumblr findings, they reported that the single longest outage for a Tumblr blog over the course of the year was 3 hours. However, three of the four blogs being monitored had no outage that lasted more than 1 hour and 37 minutes.

Pingdon points out one notable fact. “One mitigating circumstance is that Tumblr is probably the fastest growing of these services, which does tend to come with its own set of scalability problems. To give you an idea: A year ago the service had 11 million blogs. Today it has more than 37 million blogs.” This also seems to point to the fact that despite Tumblr being less “reliable” than the other blogging platforms it isn’t deterring people from choosing it over it’s more reliable counterparts.

Have you had any issues with Tumblr downtime this year? Feel free to share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

Megan O’Neill is the resident web video enthusiast here at Social Times. Megan covers everything from the latest viral videos to online video news and tips, and has a passion for bizarre, original and revolutionary content and ideas.

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